Category: travel

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canada general snow travel trip reports

wapta icefields traverse: day three

Bow Hut – Peyto Hut. 6km. 300m altitude gain – 150m altitude lost. 4hrs.

We were laughing as we got up this morning. Only 6km! With only 300m elevation gain! This was a rest day! So we slept in until the hut was nearly empty, and by the time we finished breakfast (for me: pancakes, porridge, some beef jerky and a snickers bar… two full days of fully loaded skiing can make a girl hungry) we nearly had the place to ourselves.

 

In the kitchen at Bow Hut

 

It was a beautiful sunny day as we meandered up the slope back up onto the glacier from Bow Hut. Our pace was slow and casual as we stopped to snack and take photos as often as we wanted – ah, luxury.

 

Skiing up from Bow Hut onto the glacier

 

We tossed up the idea of making a side trip up Mt Rhondda, but decided against it due to… well, laziness perhaps. And the fact that this was supposed to be a rest day, we were kind of looking forward to spending an afternoon lazing around.

 

Towards Mt Rhondda

 

It didn’t take long to finish all the climbing we were going to do that day, then it was a gentle, mostly flat cruise across the icefield.

 

Skin track views – Alex somewhere

 

 

Occasional animal tracks in the snow

 

It wasn’t long until the valley containing Peyto Hut popped into sight. We cruised down towards the hut, enjoying the turns down this gentle slope.

 

Perfecting the art of skiing downhill with a 25kg pack – Alex and Amy beginning the descent to Peyto Hut

 

After another final cruel uphill (what is it with these huts? downhill all the way there, but just a final 100 metres to actually reach the hut, which means you have to reach the terrible realisation that you have to stop and put your skins on, when all you want to do is reach the hut and sit down)… but after another final cruel uphill we were relaxing at the hut – which had a patio! It was also lovely and spacious inside, with enormous windows, and noone else there!

 

Hut Sweet Hut – Alex

 

We spread out our things to dry, lazed in the sun, took a series of very silly jumping photos, and perused some of the reading matter we’d availed ourselves with from the hut. As it eventually started to cool down a bit, and we probably needed to get out of the sun anyway, we made a move to the table just inside the hut.

 

Hut Sweet Hut – Megan

 

Lazing around and having a slow dinner, we admired the view and read the hut log. We learnt about the annual April visits of the Gay Christian Telemark Association and wondered if they would be coming this weekend. At 7pm another couple turned up at the hut, so we no longer had it to ourselves, but it was still a quiet relaxing evening, as we sat planning to ski up a peak tomorrow.

 

Hut Sweet Hut – Amy

 

Categories
canada general travel

attempting to burn my own personal hole in the ozone layer

As if I haven’t done enough gadding about already this year, I have decided to travel across the Pacific Ocean and go to Australia. And then come back again 3 weeks later. Although I’m tempted by Anonymous Lefty’s noble and environmentally conscious scheme of going by ship, I shall probably just stick with an aeroplane. This is the route I shall direct the pilot to take:

 

Calgary – Melbourne

 

So in two days time I’ll probably be hanging out at an airfield of some sort, trying to hitch a ride on a plane. Or a zeppelin.

Categories
canada general travel trip reports

66° 33′ 39″ (in which we breakfast at the arctic circle)

There were no polar bears at the Arctic Circle. There was no snow. No seals, or ice, or igloos. All in all a fairly disappointing experience.

 

 

We stopped for breakfast there though, and revelled in the Northness. And to be fair, the lack of snow or polar bears made it a lot easier to sit around on the ground eating muesli than it would have been otherwise.

 

 

Fireweed lined the road as we drove to and from Eagle Plains to the Arctic Circle. But after our morning trip up north, we turned around and started the trip back down towards Whitehorse.

 

 

Stopping along the way in Tombstone Territorial Park, which had some of my favourite scenery from the bits of the Yukon I saw (although all of the Dempster Highway was lovely). We went for a hike up Goldensides Mountain.

 

 

Its sides were sort of golden, and it had ground squirrels. And it was a lot further to the top than it looked from the bottom.

 

 
Tombstone mountain

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canada general travel

the day of two mooses

After visiting Dawson City, where I didn’t really take any photos for some reason (possibly related to my camera issues – although the 50mm is nice, it never focuses well and isn’t ideal for landscape type shots, and my lovely wide-angle lens isn’t focusing properly due to an incident with a slippery rock, and when I switched them over I got dust on my sensor again)… but anyway, Dawson City was very quaint and had Ye Olde Time boardwalks, and shops selling a vast variety of dead animals. We continued on to the Dempster Highway, which was in really good condition. Nice and dry and hard, the only problem was the random potholes of deepness. Given some of the photos I’ve seen of the Dempster (like Vik’s from his bike tour up there just recently), we were pretty lucky.

 

 

This was the day of the moose sighting at the appropriately named Two Moose Lake. It is suspected the moose sighting was brought about by the finding of this good luck charm/passport-photo (supposedly it’s someone’s father).

 

 

So we drove up the Dempster Highway, gazing at the beautiful scenery, stopping to skip through the fields of lupins and take photos, until we reached Eagle Plains, where the ubiquitous fireweed (with the purple flowers) surrounded our tents.

 

 

That evening we tried to escape the insects in the Eagle Plains Hotel, which has a lovely chandelier made of antlers, as well as several antlered heads on the wall and a complete caribou. We played shuffleboard and waited for it to get dark. Then we realised shuffleboard was actually a fairly boring game, particularly when noone can remember all the rules, and that it wasn’t actually going to get dark, at least not before the pub closed (there’s something fundamentally wrong about a pub that isn’t dark in the evening). We were kicked out at 11pm closing, in full daylight, and wandered off to try and sleep in our tents. That were full of light.

 

 

The sun set close to midnight, but rose again at 4.45am or so anyway, and there was still plenty of light around at dusk and dawn. I didn’t actually see any darkness the whole time we were there.

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canada general travel

your life or your lupins, my lord

Memorable events from my first day in the Yukon, in order of happening:

    * A German girl playing Abba’s song S.O.S. on the piano in the Bed and Breakfast we’d stayed at, thus inspiring me to start learning how to play the piano (I’m easily excited).
[This was followed by an uneventful period in which we picked up a rental Subaru, looked at a gorge, picked Emma up from the airport, purchased food and camping things, then drove up towards Dawson City – which really isn’t a very exciting drive.]

 

 

    * Testing the bear spray in calm air, leading to a cloud of spray which slowly dissipated in all directions. This lead to much coughing and sneezing and teary eyes and cursing of Megan by everyone concerned.

 

 

    * Finding lupins in Moose Creek Campground (LUPINS!!!.. She’s bloody dying and all you bring us is lupins).

 

 

(So not that much happened – it’s quiet up there!)